What to do about GramscoFabiaNazism’s roaring success, and how smokers can’t find a place in society now

Sean Gabb and I agree that this comment, reproduced below, on Sean’s piece earlier about hiding tobacco products that are on supposedly free sale, ought to be more widely shared. He and I and Ian B all agree that strategic direction of the fight for individual liberty is lacking. Perhaps it’s because we are all libertarians that we can’t cohere on a strategic platform in the way the Nazi left does – principally by discrediting (or killing, often) its opponents….Anyway, here’s Ian:-

Well, speaking as a smoker, I understand your point Sean but it’s not quite fair about the “sheeple” thing. You of all people know how hard it is for genuinely “outsider” movements to organise or gain any political traction; those nominally “grass roots” movements which succeed do so due largely to “insider” political sponsorship- gay rights, environmentalism, what have you. That is, although they may not be hegemonic at some point in history, they have a politcally inside faction who sympathise with them. If you don’t have that, your chances of success as a group are bleak. (Compare for instance the “sheepleness” of gays when they had no insider friends who would openly campaign on their behalf, in the 1890s).

The Proggies are insiders and are very good at what they do. They learned from the error of Alcohol Prohibition in the USA that decades of demonisation groundwork- so that nobody dares object- is the key to success, and they have pursued this ruthlessly with target number 2, the smokers. It is hard to know what strategy smokers could have adopted to prevent all this. I’ll be damned if I can think of one.

When a society decides to persecute some group, however numerous, there is generally very little they can do about it. Stalin was just one man, but millions upon millions of Russians and Eastern Europeans suffered under him. They were not stupid sheeple; they were simply vanquished by the application of power. A million smokers could amass in Trafalgar Square for a demonstration, and if the BBC bothered to cover it at all, it would be by simply filming anyone they could find coughing, or interviewing the least articulate and dim witted demonstrators. Nothing would change.

People don’t normally resist power because they recognise, correctly, that resistance is generally futile. We live in an authoritarian society; the brief semi-”liberal” phase of the post-war period is thoroughly over, thanks to decades of well organised reaction. Nobody found a way to prevent the reaction setting in. As a result, our country has been changed forever. Nobody found a way to stop mass immigration, or leave the EU, or relegalise drugs or even abolish the BBC. Who is to blame? Everyone, and no-one. We live in history, and history tells far more tales of oppression than of liberty.

We need a strategy for achieving liberty. This is far more important that discussions of what we might do if we ever got it; whether to be Anarcho-Capitalists or Syndicalo-Minarchists or whether to have a Gold Standard. The Enemy have all the wrong answers, but all the right strategic methodology, and that’s why they win and we lose.

If I knew the answer to this, I would give it. But I don’t.
Perhaps we spend too much time on trying to agree among ourselves that what we are saying is right, (and rfining our arguments in front of each other so that we are all sure that everybody’s position holds water, and too little time on killing all the GramscoFabiaNazi bastards untill they are all dead.

Of course, I’m not saying that all Libertarians all agree that we (or anybody at all for that matter) should be killing all the GramscoFabiaNazi bastards until they are all dead and no trace of their writings or thoughts infests any kind of self-respecting library for evermore. But there is a case for suggesting that the GFN-bastards have caused a deal of trouble and impediment to human progress and emancipation, and that “something should be done”. It’s hard to see what, though.

It’s like being asked the way by a lost traveller, and having to say “Well, if I was you, I would not have started to get there from here.”

6 responses to “What to do about GramscoFabiaNazism’s roaring success, and how smokers can’t find a place in society now”

A most interesting question. The reason why the whole gay thing gained traction in the 1980’s was of course, so many of the political elite were gay, so there was massive self-interest. As to environmentalism, this gave the politicians an excuse for more taxation and control, so again, easy to see why it was adopted.

Getting someone within the existing structure to adopt a libertarian cause will not be easy or obvious because what is in it for any politician if he is asked to reduce taxes or remove restrictions and thus payroll vote jobs?

So there are perhaps three possible approaches. One, convince a variety of politicians of the popularity of freedom and low taxes. The tory poll surge post Osborne saying he would increase IHT shows this is obvious and popular. That said, you correctly point out the trouble in getting them to listen, although one or two genuinely don’t understand the chasm we are heading towards. Detlev Schlieter mentioned in a blog entry how upset and genuinely shocked some MP’s were when he gave a presentation to them. Some really are that stupid that they have not looked outside the box.

Two, await the impending collapse of the western liberal model. This is troublesome because we may become more not less authoritarian as a result, short-term anyway.

Three, and perhaps the best one. Infiltrate at grass roots level political parties as militant did to Labour in the 1980’s. This does mean political engagement and I know this is anathema to many (myself included), but short of violent revolution (and I do not advocate violence Mr GCHQ man!) nothing is changing for the better in the short to medium term.

With all respect, talking to politicians is a waste of time. They are selected for stupidity and corruptibility. The last honest man to sit in the Commons was Enoch Powell. The others who occasionally smile on us are all frauds.

Infiltrating political parties is a waste of time. It worked for the Trots because the Labour leadership was currently rudderless, and they were utterly ruthless, and willing to use and expand any taxpayer-funded patronage they could colonise. It’s worked for the Moslems, because they have numbers on their side, and have already established a state within a state.

With respect Sean their are only a small number of activists, both leftist and muslim. The vast majority of muslims are not involved with agitation and the vast maj of labour voting idiots still do so because their Dad voted for ‘em not because of thought-through support.

As for “The Trots”–the scum of ZuNuLab are mostly middle/upper middle/upper class (There is an article for IanB on how all these –aristos/prodnoses/leftist scum –ended up in bed with each other). In every case we have a small number of bad uns who got of their arses and did something. Their original plans to suck soviet dick didn’t come off but they keep on going. Theres the plan. Otherwise you might as well change the name to the “Grab your ankles and take it up the arse alliance”.

My answer to how they got in bed with each other is that they always were in bed with each other. One way to look at the Progressivist suite of fascinations is that it simply reflects the prejudices of the bouerg… borjwasz… snobs. It’s interesting that if you trace back historically to the initial cultural revolution, of the 1800s, it’s pretty much impossible to tell “Left” and “Right” apart. There are simply social reform radicals, who later split into two wings- one retains the religious justifications (“the right”) and the other one secularies and grasps at things like Marx (“the left”). For instance, the thing we call social work (now thought of as “left wing”) was, in the 1800s, synonymous with Christian missionary work (“right wing”).

So, the ruling class develops particular attitudes to how the rest of us should behave, and they then impose them. This is Progressivism. 100 years ago, Progressives were relentlessly anti homosexual. Then they changed their minds, and persecute everyone else for having those attitudes, and replaced the Eternal Homo with the Eternal Paedo.

The attitudes themselves are primarily a mixture of two of the three great eighteenth century ideologies; second wave puritanism, and romanticism. We, the remnant libertarians, are the third of those, liberalism, of course. Hence their obsessions with sex, nature, food, and so on. The core belief is that it is the job of the ruling class to “save” everybody else through interventionist reform. Anyone who believes in that is already in the big progressive bed.

Ian B – Let me ask again. You regard socialism as relatively unimportant among the causes of our present troubles. I agree. Socialism was one among many convenient excuses for bossing everyone about. This being so, why do you get so worked up about the KC-DD’A-TK stuff that we publish here?

Don’t feel obliged to answer this at once. I shall be off-line tomorrow.